| Topic: | Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:It's official: we must attempt to reduce our car usage | |
| Posted by: | Dominik Klimowski | |
| Date/Time: | 12/01/25 14:24:00 |
| If we look at the economics of roadspace dispassionately, it would be fair to say that streets having more than half their space taken up by parked cars is not an economic use of space. Many journeys in a car are taken by one person, yet that person takes up a disproportionate amount of road space. When they finish their journey, they continue to take up the same amount of space. If you look at the most popular and regularly used cycelways you will see that the busiest ones are those which are connected to others, and get people to their destinations in the most economical way possible. In order to populate more cycleways, these have to be connected and designed with the economics of getting people safely and directly between the places they need to go. Bike hangars are a good example of economising roadspace. 6 people can store their vehicles in the space it would take to park one car. Yet some people become apoplectic and percieve it as a ‘waste of space’. If I can use the road between Kew Bridge and Richmond as an example. I have driven the route and cycled it. The cycleway is clear and safe. But if it was removed, there is would not be enough space for another car lane. It would be given over to the odd car parking space. Do we want to give the option of travelling along that road by various means? Or do we want to give the space back entirely to motor vehicles, whether they are moving or not? Which would be more economically sustainable? The end goal isn’t to have roads saturated with traffic, but to have streets which appear empty because everyone is moving freely by the quickest and easiest means available. My generation has been sold the dream that owning a car is best for the individual and best for the economy. This, I’m afraid, is not true, and not sustainable. It is something many of the younger generation in London have come to realise. Look at any car advert and you see only one car on the road. That is far from reality. Would you agree with me that if we all drove, we would not in fact have the ‘freedom of the road’ we were promised, but we’d each be stuck behind the car in front? |